Finding Opportunity in Collapse: Arcana Labs from Unemployment
Last Updated: 2026-07-14 00:00:00 -0500
As a general rule, I don’t talk much about my professional life on this blog - working in tech means the vast majority of what I do on a daily basis is wrapped up in enough layers of NDAs, Information Security Policies, and international regulatory language that even a lawyer would struggle to find the safe footing, and I have no delusions of being a lawyer. Today though, I’m going to break with that tradition in order to make a somewhat sad announcement.
Yesterday, I was let go from a new position I had taken in the the spring without notice and without cause. Understandably, I’ve found this sudden change of my employment status, daily schedule, and immediate-term outlook disorienting, concerning, and to be frank, a little bit terrifying. We’re sitting on top of one of the worst job markets of my lifetime, at a time when almost every industry I have inroads into is turning away from fair pay for fair work and toward slop engine operation. It’s scary. But it’s not the end of the story.
An Ending is Just a Beginning-Unlooked-For
Surprising nobody, in my teens I dabbled in the Tarot, a habit that honestly still bubbles up from time to time - there’s a reason it was the first thing I thought of when I designed the randomness systems for The Game for Scribes. In the “standard” Smith-Rider-Waite deck, some of the Major Arcana trump cards are notoriously seen as being “negative” signs. Among these is a card known as the Tower, which depicts the destruction of the Tower of Babel by God, drawing on the biblical story of man’s hubris in attempting to reach too close to heaven. Because of the artwork’s negative connotations, the card is often seen in the same light - disasterous collapse.
But another common interpretation is simply “an ending to a pattern”, and when viewed in that light it’s easier to take the long view. As the old Zen proverb goes, “that which is of the nature to be born, is of the nature to die”, and if that’s sounds sad, I think I disagree. I grew up in and around preserved sections of the great pacific boreal rainforests of British Columbia. I don’t think a year went by that a school trip or guided tour didn’t have me ankles-deep in doug fir needles, shiverring in my raincoat, and listening to lectures on how the tree deadfalls make room for the growth of new trees, feeding countless funghi, insects, invertibrates, and the things that feed on those things, and I seem to have walked away from those experiences with two lessons:
- Dead trees are land whale falls, which make trees the whales of the land I suppose, and;
- The ending of something is just the start of something else.
Or, to crib from The Expanse's UN Secretary General Esteban Sorrento-Gillis:
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
The Sensible Bit
I am doing the sensible things here. I’m looking into my potions to avail myself of Canada’s Employment Insurance program, for a start. It’s a system I’ve been paying into for over twenty years now, and it’s intended for exactly this sort of thing: emergency income supplementation when you’ve lost your job suddenly through no fault of your own. My hope is that it should buy me some time that I can afford to constrain my job search - for now - to industries that best suit me. If that falls through or if the job market proves as bad as I fear it is, I’m going to keep throwing wider and wider nets. If all else fails, a line cook with a decade of experience - even a bit stale - can always find a job somewhere.
That being said, if you hear of any opportunities in the technical space, I’m a Senior-Level Site Reliability Engineer with Diaster Recovery, Monitoring Maturation, and Information Security expertise and I’m open to remote work opportunities from anyone willing to hire a Canadian. If that’s you or someone you know, consider dropping me a line.
But all that being said, there are some more interesting implications to this unexpected development.
Wildfires, Pine Trees, and Carbon Black
I’ve made no secret over the years that, if given the absolute choice by chance or by the adoption of sensible policies like Universal Basic Income, my career would immediately shift toward self-directed creative work. I consider myself a writer and interdisciplinary maker first, and an engineer and cook and all those other things second. In some ways, while it’s extremely uncomfortable and mildly horrifying, the sudden loss of the safety net of a regular salary has opened up a range of movements not previously available to me. While I’m still hunting for traditional employment, my daily schedule - and daily work output - are entirely my own.
So to that end, I’m clawing as much time as I reasonably can back for myself. Some of that’s getting dumped into boring household projects that have been put off for years. Some is getting put into caring for myself in the ways I haven’t been while I’ve been trying to hold a career down. But the rest of it, I’m putting into finding ways to make the more fulfilling work I can do - the writing and building and creating - earn what I need to get by.
I guess that’s my silver lining then: while I’m nailing down a payroll job, I’m getting an experiment in living something like my dream. Of course, the dream doesn’t come with the perpetual risk of homelessness, seperation from by pets, or painful, agonizing failure. But hey: you gotta speculate to accumulate, right?
Over the next few days I’m going to announce initiative after initiative as they gel up, but if you’ve been around for a while already and want to help to make this work, here’s a few things you can do:
- Peruse our writings section for links to my existing novels, book games and zines page. All of my writings are available in physical and digital formats and are - to my mind, anyway - fairly priced.
- Check our support page for links to my Ko-Fi and Patreon profiles as well as other avenues for your patronage; especially where so much of our software offering has been FOSS.
- stay tuned for upcoming changes to the Patreon tiers to better reflect the new meta.
- Follow me on Twitch; starting very shortly I will be resuming a regular and frequent stream schedule of the usual mix of creative and gaming content. Since I’m a Twitch Affiliate, even your viewership supports me, especially if you have Twitch Nitro.
Obviously none of this is to suggest that you somehow owe me financial support - please don’t purchase, register for, or donate to anything you can’t afford.
I appreciate as well all the kind words and job leads people have already been sending me as part of this, frankly, rather difficult transition. You folks are the best.